Si, hablo Español (kind of)

One of the great things about travel, of course, is speaking other languages. To be honest I have a kind of bull-in-a-china-shop approach to this. If I can, I'll swot up on "I don't speak X very well", "Please speak more slowly" and any phrase that means something like "The thing you use to..." for when I don't know a word. And then I will blunder forward, shooting out mismatched nouns and adjectives, hopelessly wrong tenses and vague phrases I think ought to make sense, hoping people will have the patience to engage me in conversation and that, bit by bit, I'll get better. This works, of course, pretty much everywhere except France, where, to me at any rate, it feels like every waiter is a member of the Academie Française on Neighbourhood Watch duty.

I once spoke Spanish fairly confidently, by which I mean I could hold a conversation as long as didn't require the subjunctive (what does?) or words beyond a fairly basic vocabulary. Then I was lucky enough to learn Brazilian Portuguese with Pedro and my Spanish had to take a siesta. There's not room in my head for two languages that are so close together. All the words get mixed up. 

Tulum is a melting pot of nationalities but most of my friends here seem to be either Argentinian or Italian and, more and more, we have been speaking together in Spanish. They all speak English perfectly, of course, but it's become a bit of project to help David practicar su Español. And what is really nice is that they are not slowing down for me. Tullio is useful. He is one of those natural linguists and happily translates when there's something I don't understand. And he is very handy in a group when we have had a few beers and I have drifted off for a moment only to tune in again to find myself facing a wall of syllables that make no sense whatsoever.

I brought with me a wonderfully out-of-date and useless phrase book that seems to have been printed before they had to put the year under the copyright notice. The YALE English-Spanish Conversation Guide (2nd edition revised) begins:

Here you have a Yale Guide, a booklet which wants to make itself useful and be a handy travelling companion.

a sentence that doesn't feel as though it has been written by someone from Yale, or indeed an English speaker, or indeed, to be honest, a human. Then you are straight into one of those daunting sections on grammar, including tips such as:

The relative superlative is rendered by prefixing the definite article to the Spanish comparative.

and

In Spanish, as in English, there are seven kinds of adverb.

(Really?)

But it's the phrases themselves that make it a great read. I like the casual imperiousness of:

Bring towels, soap. 

Traígame toallas, jabón.

and, under "In The Plane":

Can I have some cotton wool for my ears?

Deme un poco de algodón para los oídos, por favor.

I hope to use both of these before I get back to the UK.

Fast-forwarding to the modern world, I am learning a lot of new vocabulary from a brilliant website called Memrise, created by a guy called Ed Cooke who is a bit of a memory genius. (I interviewed him for Wired last year, though, rereading my piece, I realise that it is so overpacked with data that it too doesn't feel as if it was written by a human.) Memrise uses the metaphor of new words as seeds. You "plant" them, "water" them and eventually "harvest" them at steadily increasing intervals, which helps lock them into your brain. It's a very neat site, and I am finally working out what words are Spanish and what, to be put out to pasture for the time being, are Portuguese. The subjunctive, though, I think can still wait awhile.